Hello, again.
It has seemed that I have forgone posting here for quite some time. I never really got the hang of it, and the design never seemed right. This is not an excuse, but more of an explanation of what has been happening in my life.
Most recently, I have finally made the move out of Connecticut and now reside in Washington, DC. I have wanted to make the move out of Connecticut for some time; I yearned for a big city lifestyle. And with my fiancee finally graduating from her master’s program, I thought this would be a great time to make the jump.
It was not easy, however! There seemed to be immeasurable amount of hurdles that we had to jump. Finding an apartment in the DC area was almost impossible; our one remaining car (We sold my VW Rabbit to help fund the move) was hit and totaled; Budget Rental cancelled our truck last minute. However, this has been my first week here (I was lucky enough to have the ability to work from home at my current job), and I could not be happier.
With this move, I have revitalized my energies towards all things internet. I have a growing desire to finish all my outstanding projects and it starts here…
What’s new?
I have done very little here in terms of coding, but with the release of Bootstrap by Twitter, I feel as though I can throw something up that looks half-way decent without any trouble at all. The iteration of CSS that I had on this site before was terrible, and it never allowed me to be proud of what I was doing here (or similarly what I was doing over at Geohackr). With Bootstrap, I have something nice enough to get by, where now I can work solely on content. I am still using Jekyll, but I have added a rake deploy option that allows me to put up new posts super-fast with minimal effort.
On the horizon
I have a lot going through in my head right now as to what I want to do moving forward. Below is a short list of what I have on my plate and what I have planned for each of them.
Currently in the process of switching out the CSS for jQuery Mobile to make it more user friendly on most smartphones. Also looking to add some extra features to make it stand above the other mobile beer-checkin sites.
Currently a pet project, it has some success from people using it once and a while. Have been re-writing it using the Flask micro-framework to learn the python wrapper of the Twitter API.
140Pl.us
With the removal of Deck.ly from TweetDeck, I have some renewed interest in this idea. There is a lot of work to get this up and running with any success, but it should be an interesting challenge.
This blog ran into the same issue I ran into with this one. I think with Bootstrap, I should be able to get it up and running with some success. Also, I NEED to finish my thesis so I should get a renewed interest in the topic anyways.
GISQuery
Now that OSQA is maturing with some regularity, I feel that bringing GISQuery up and running will be a lot easier. I rewrote most of the code in Flask, but never made it go live. I am thinking of setting up the code on GitHub as Flask-QandA and going from there. This website has a lot of work to compete with StackExchange, but I think personalizing it beyond what StackExchange will be willing to do is where I can win this battle.
news.GISQuery
This is a new site I have been working on that allows people to submit GIS stories in the fashion of Hacker News. I am very excited about this one, and with the new developments in Flask (mostly the new Admin extension), the progress of this site should rapidly pick up.
DotFiler
DotFiler is suppose to be a website where people can upload their dotfiles and retrieve them when needed. I was hoping to add a social flare to the site letting people rate/comment/subscribe to dotfiles, but this idea never got off the ground. Maybe one day…
BiblioQuick
BiblioQuick was something that I thought of while working on my master’s thesis. I though that it would be great if there was a place that you can go and see all the bibliographies of papers on a topic and have people rate and rank each bibliography. Much like DotFiler, this never got off the ground, but as I said above I am again getting into the swing of the master’s thesis and ideas for this site my come fast and furious.
In Closing
Thanks for reading my ramblings above. Come back here as I continue my promise of writing more. I also plan on making some videos that I will be posting here. I love Minecraft and would love to start a “Let’s Play.” There is also the idea of creating a video tutorial of Flask as I work my way through building the websites mentioned above. Who knows… Thanks again, and come back for more regularly-scheduled posts!